Year of the atheist!?

Yesterday was my 41st birthday. I have been alive 5 (soon to be 6) decades and sometimes feel like my life is only just starting to gain some momentum. I want this year to be transitional, a change from what was to something new. I guess, I am starting to feel (both psychologically and physically) a real sense of my own mortality.

I am going to start by declaring February 12th to be the new "New Year's eve". The chinese and muslims (and no doubt others) work on a lunar calendar (where the new year shifts back about 11 days in our julian calendar) each year. I don't propose anything so radical, we just entered the year of the ox in china, 2009 in the normal sense of timekeeping, my 42nd year is going to be the year of the atheist.

The year of the atheist represents a paradigm shift in my thinking and approach to getting what I want out of life. It is the year I explore my potential as a thinker, a doer, and somehow make a measure of my contributions to humanity. The choice of atheist makes sense to me for a number of reasons.

I am reading (and rereading) sections of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and find this book to be inspirational in terms of my approach to Feb 13th 2009 - Feb 12th 2010. Dawkins is a courageous voice for science educators, free thinkers, and those sickened by living in a world where much evil and hate is brought on by ignorance and blind faith. I looked up "atheist" in the thesaurus on dictionary.com.

Note the reference: Roget's "21st Century" thesaurus. It interests me that "21st Century" seems to imply progress and is being thrown around with reference to "skills" in education circles like it is the reformation. Synonyms for "atheist" like "heathen", "infidel", "irreligionist" and "pagen" are hardly 21st century but rather reflect a more "inquisition" like attitude. Surely we have come further than that in today's society but the negative stigma associated with the word "atheist" is real, very evident, and for me, a stimulus for discussion (oh the controversy).

I have been a closet atheist for some time now. Dawkins has convinced me I no longer need to be that. I also think that the "you're an atheist" exclamation by others injects some much need controversy into my life. Not that I want to argue the existence of God with anyone (read Dawkins if you want to do this), it is just the fact that the statement symbolizes my desire to cultivate myself as a free thinker.

Other projects for the year of the atheist include my version of the 366 day photo project. Like others (this is not my idea), I am proposing to take and choose one picture for each day of my 42nd year. Picasa and Flickr are being debated right now as my technology medium of choice to keep this record.

I am coining terms that I hope enter mainstream vocabulary in the year of the atheist. "Blogged down" describes how many students feel in our classrooms right now as teachers jump on the 21st century bandwagon. I also hope I am the first person to go on record with the idea of a "digital footprint". More about this later.